i am working on a document in in design in english that needs to be produced in 2 other languages. the people supplying th etranslated text do not have in design. is it possible to export to a pdf that they can add transaltions in and then for me to re-open their ammended pdf in in design?

The simple answer is no. PDF is a "final" format and there's really no way for your translators to do their work in that format, even if it was a good idea, which it isn't. PDF is either palces as essetially an image format, uneditable in ID, or you can use a commercial plugin to open a PDF and convert it to ID, but there's no guarantee of perfection.

Joel Cherney is our translation expert, and hopefully he'll see this in a few hours and comment, but I think the first thing to find out is what formats do your translation people normally use?